Sunday, August 25, 2013

I’m not into this idea that all insects need to be poisoned,
stomped, broomed to death, or executed via firing squad. However, there are some insects, chief among
them being fireants and yellow jackets, who don’t do enough good to make up for
the damage they do. Both parties are super aggressive stingers who haven’t the
least bit of live-and-let-live in them. I didn’t start the war between those
species and myself and I haven’t the ways and means to end it.

The broadcasting of poison in an area to get rid of one
species usually winds up killing hundreds of beneficial insects and most of
those would be eating the pest insects if left to their own devices. But the
poison wars leave everyone dead except us and whoever it is we are trying to
get rid of, and that’s the irony of it all.

I went after some yellow jackets earlier this year and I
took a can of poison with me. This was an all-out frontal assault on their nest
and there could be only one survivor. Yellow jackets tend to massively attack
their prey, and in this case it was me, so I got dinged over a dozen times
before I was able to close their front door and build a pretty good fire on top
of the nest. I dug the still smoldering ruins out of the ground and honestly,
they would have been so much better off allowing the mutts and me some space.

Dragonflies are a lot better at killing flying insects than
we are and they are insects, too. The poison wars have cost us more dragonflies
than mosquitoes and if you’ve ever tried to buy dragonfly larvae then you know
what it costs to try to reintroduce them to an ecosystem. The tools we need to rid us of pests occur
naturally yet there is little profit in this for those who market poison as the
only path to freedom from what bugs us.

That said…

My mailbox has become a haven for roaches. It’s not like I leave
food out overnight in my mailbox or keep pizza boxes stacked up in the corner
of my mailbox. Oddly, I cannot imagine why roaches would decide that a metal
box with my name on it might be a place for hundreds, nay, thousands of their
kind to congregate. The other day I stopped to get my mail in the predawn
darkness and there were dozens of them hiding in between the junk mail and
notices that I could get a new credit card simply by filling out a form and
sending it in. Okay, that’s junk mail too, nevermind.

Three of them landed in front of the speedometer as if awed
by the acceleration of their species. I was able to kill a pair of the intrepid
roach explorers but the third escaped me. I think there are a few left in my
truck but none have surfaced again and I have vacuumed the truck out on a daily
basis in an effort to make sure none can hide from me. I dread being on a date
or something like that and have one drop in the lap on some unsuspecting woman.
That might be a deal breaker, especially if she leaps from the truck while it
is moving.

Is there a protocol for this? If I send flowers to a woman
who has been maimed while ejecting from my truck due to insect attack is this
considered empathy or romance? I fear I do not date enough to be good enough to
recognize the more subtle points of the ritual.

This morning I took the can of poison I used on the yellow jackets
and went after the roach haven my mailbox has become. Without ceremony or proclamation
I opened the door and let the nukefest begin. Caught so unawares were they most
of them were drenched in the first salvo, unable to scurry underneath the offer
of a 3.14156% mortgage rate that would make my life as easy as pie. Some
managed to make it to the bottom of the junk mail pile where AAA would have me
towed to safety in any emergency, even an insect related one, for a low month
membership fee, but it was far too late for them all. A mailbox is a metal box
canyon and I brought death and destruction upon their hideout. As I watched their bodies dropping to the ground
I wondered why there wasn’t some resident spider or some lurking mantis here,
but no… they were all long gone before the war started.

The Poison War has brought even those of us who despise the
products to use them. We have little choice now; all the predators are gone. We
are as trapped as the bug in my mailbox for we have lost all ability to create
habitat for beneficial insects and we have done little but helped evolve those
we seek to destroy. Even now I suspect there are roaches under my mailbox who
are stoned, not dying, and they will return. And they will have the munchies.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

I had a business meeting that ran way past where it should
have stopped. I was late getting off work to begin with and was tired of people
and talking and tired of not being where I wanted to be and tired of doing
something I did not want to do. I never buy bottled water because the plastic
bottles always wind up the Pacific but dehydration had begun to set in.

There was a woman in the store who was crying and she was
desperate because her cell phone had just died and she had just found Frank.
She wanted to borrow my phone, the store’s phone, anyone’s phone, but she
wanted to call her son, who lives near Atlanta, to come get Frank.

She got Frank, a pit bull, when he was a puppy, two years
ago, and she kept him tethered to a tree outside her house. Frank got away a
week ago and she had looked in the animal shelter for him every day and she had
put out flyers and she had waited for Frank to come home. Today she found him in
the ditch near her house where the weeds were thick. I told her I would get
Frank for her.

Frank had been hit by a car or a truck and he had been hit
hard. A loop of his intestines hung out of his belly. Frank had survived the
hit and had crawled towards home. The intestines stretched out behind him where
he had crawled. The piece of broken chain attached to his collar trailed out
nearly as long. Judging from his state of decay Frank had been dead for a few
days. The stench was overwhelming and only got worse. His tail bones had been
dislodged from the skin and stuck out obscenely straight. There were two very
large patched of hide hanging down. Frank’s back legs had been crushed along
with his hips. One of his back legs gave and nearly came off. The woman turned
and threw up. She walked a couple of steps then when down on her hands and knees
and retched. Frank was bloated and maggots were falling off of him when I
picked him up and put him on my tailgate.

She asked me if I could dig a grave for Frank and I told her
I would. All she had was a flat nosed shovel and it was pretty clear I couldn’t
dig a grave with it. After about fifteen minutes of trying she asked me to stop
and honestly I didn’t have much left. She asked me if I would take Frank out
into woods away from the house and I told her I would.

Frank’s body was falling apart when I took him off the
tailgate. I left him out by a beaver dam, in a place a dog would have loved to
nose around and swim, I took the collar and chain off his neck and tossed it
into the water. Frank was finally free and he was finally safe. I sat in my truck and tried to remember
whatever else I could say, it was clear the woman had loved Frank and his death
had hurt her.

Frank lived his life on the end of a ten foot long chain. He
died with that much of his insides on the outside. His family had to find him
in that condition and that is the only way I will ever remember Frank.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

If you can’t get Tim Burton and Johnny Depp into a project
that involves a 70’s vampire soap opera then you might as well write it off
because without those two it’s going to be a horrible mess. As it turns out,
even with those two, it is still a horrible mess. “Dark Shadows” is one of
those movies that is every bit as wretched as the reviews suggest that it is.

But how can this be? The movie has Eva Green and Michelle
Pfeiffer cast in it. Those two alone, even in a mediocre movie ought be able to
pull off a memorable scene or two, right?

You’d be wrong and I was too.

But the movie has Alice Cooper in it and surely that alone
would be enough to pull the movie off the bottom shelf of the last VHS rental
store in the suburbs of Moose Eye Montana, but no. Alice Cooper cannot save
this film for it was already undead before he put on his strait jacket.

You want to know what kills this film? Karen Carpenter. The
number of people who want to go to a vampire movie and then have to listen to
Karen Carpenter sing an entire song would equal the same number of people who
think “Dark Shadows” was the best movie ever. The song drags out like
fingernails across the back of a hyena covered in excrement. No movie can survive
five minutes under the mute button. No movie should try.

Remember the film “Juno”? That was one of those movies where
the soundtrack was allowed to run free and even in a very good movie it can be
a distraction. But for a movie that is already wounded by bad writing it’s like
a stake in the heart, so to speak.

Yet it only gets worse. The whole build up to the end just
limps along with the excitement of watching a gerbil on a wheel. The physics of
the movie’s world doesn’t seem to make sense even to the characters. The ending
is meh, meh, and then there is the climatic meh at the end where we are
threatened with a meh sequel.

I’m happy I didn’t pay good money to see this movie and I am
sorry I wasted two hours of my life and a Netflix pick watching it.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

I once tried to light a fire in a barrel using gasoline and
a match. The gasoline was old as hell and it didn’t smell like real gas at all.
So when I threw the match into the barrel nothing happened for a second and I took that one step forward to see what had gone wrong. The sound of gasoline fumes suddenly catching
fire is a sound that is quite unmistakable. WHOOOF! And there I was, without my
eyebrows and with the top part of my hair fizzled. I also received some second
degree burns on my face for my troubles.

When I started an outside job over twenty years ago I
noticed all the old timers wore long sleeve shirts and for most of them it was
far too late. Decades of working out in direct sunlight had blasted their skin
with enough radiation most of them had odd looking white growths on their arms.
“Sun Spots” they called these things and nearly all of them had scars where the
growths had been removed surgically and some of them had actually gone to a
doctor to have this procedure done.

I went from working on the road to doing land surveying a
couple of years later and it was just as bad as far as exposure to direct
sunlight for long periods of time. So one day I decided to start wearing more
and more protective clothing. I bought a
hat with a wide brim and started wearing long sleeves even in the very heat of
Summer. What I discovered is that in a humid environment where there is a furnace
in the sky, long sleeves will do you more good than short sleeves. With short
sleeves the sweat from your body is blasted away from your skin before it was
time to cool you. A long sleeve shirt holds the moisture in and saves it. Trust
me, I’ve been working outside and doing yardwork and hiding from the sun for
about fifteen years. I know what works.

A woman once told me if she was ever in a house fire she
hoped we were still together because I nearly glowed in the dark I was so white
and she would just follow the Casper to safety. “The Whitest White Man Ever” is how a
co-worker described me. I even went so far to design a hat that had a flap in
the back to keep the sun off my neck and a flap in the front to keep the sun
off my face. Of course, this made me look like a terrorist so when I walked
into a store one day wearing this get up the clerk nearly shot me without a
word. The irony of being killed because of wearing protective clothing would
not have been lost on me, in my final seconds.

Anyway, I received an invitation to lie by a pool and drink
with a truly intriguing woman and after a decade and a half of living in the
shadows I decided to come out into the light. Smartly, I decided to get a
little sun before venturing out into Death Valley. The front yard takes an hour
or so to mow and how much sun could a man get in an hour, in the early morning?
Surely, I thought to myself, I wouldn’t get fried in so short of time.

So, there I was in a pair of tennis shoes and a pair of
shorts. I’ve awoken in bed with more clothing on than this. Hell, I’ve had sex
wearing more clothes than this, but that’s another story for another time and I
was much younger, mind you.

I felt exposed and naked. The native insects reminded me
that bare skin is tasty and is good with a side order of blood smeared across
the sting area after being scratched. But I was determined to get the front yard
mowed completely, before retreating. The Charge of the White Brigade began with
good intent. By the time I was half way through the event parts of my body
where tingling. This, I thought to myself, is what a vampire feels right before
he bursts into flames with a scream. My
back, my head, and my legs, okay, after writing that I realized that covers
more body than is left, but those were the areas that seemed to be the most
affected. Once done with the yard I took a shower. I had a dog
adoption event that I had volunteered for and in the shower I realized that
there were areas on my body that were going to have to be covered with
clothing, not that dogs care, but trying to get a family to adopt a dog might
include me having clothes covering most of my body.

Irony, once again, is amused by my attempts at living.

So it really wasn’t that bad. Okay, it was. I wore a hat and
my bald head itched the entire time I was there but that was better than my
skull looking like the tip of a match. My shoulders were torched fairly well
and at one time a kindly older man clapped me on the left shoulder and I nearly
screamed aloud. The two things I have most studiously avoid in my life, strange
people and sunlight, came together on a Saturday afternoon and I realize I do neither
of them very well.

The idea of more direct sunlight is something that I do not
think I can do, pool or no pool, intriguing woman or none. I do not think I did
particularly well talking people into adopting dogs but a couple of dogs made
their way into families with my help or perhaps in spite of it. I cannot say.

I do feel drained and totally exhausted today. The same feeling I had from being scorched by
that barrel with gasoline in it extended to my body this very morning, and only
my eyebrows being intact is different. Yet as overwhelmed as being at an
adoption event might be I did feel like I helped in some small way in getting
dogs into homes. Into that light I will have to venture into again.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Sunday, August 4, 2013

The air this morning was hanging like a dead man left to rot.
As I watched the eastern sky go from grey to a lighter grey I realized that
mowing at seven wasn’t going to happen. My shirt clung to my skin with a
prickly sort of moisture that doesn’t feel like dew, or rain, or waterfalls.
No, this is a rodent’s breath type wetness that seems to be cloying and stagnant.
Gnats and mosquitoes are swimming in it, thriving in the thick air and nothing
else can. There is no breeze. There is not a hint of freshness in the dawn’s
awakening. I pull the cord to the mower and the blue smoke hangs in the air
like a disease looking for the dying to claim.

This is early August in all its finest. True enough, this
has been a wet cool Summer if it has been anything at all. There has been to
killing heat. Sam has survived this Summer now, the end is in sight. If I can
get the aging Grey past the next month the heat will be gone for another six or
seven months. This time next month the days will be noticeable shorter in the morning
and in the afternoon and the heat, even when it can rise above triple digits
cannot stay there long. No, the calendar count stays for no man, no reason, and
no season. The Summer Solstice was forty-three days ago and in another
forty-three the Equinox will be nearly here. The first half of Summer is always
the worst and it will spend the next half struggling to make some heated
memory, like an aging lover trying to stay just one more night.

A mowed last Saturday, or perhaps it was last Friday, yes,
Friday, and the grass is still thick and tall right now. But July is gone now.
The blast furnace that was the growing season has ended for nearly all things
that exploded out of the wet Spring we had. This is not the end by no means and
the spot in the yard that, for reasons that escape me, grow grass thicker and
taller than anywhere else, are just so. Yet the edges where the grass grows
more slowly doesn’t need as much attention. There are signs that this Summer
has begun to pass. Even as it saps my energy with the heat and humidity I can
tell it is not able to hit nearly as hard.

The driveway is full of white beach sand and little grass
grows in the wheel paths. There is a canine which roams late at night and if
he, or she, is a coyote it is a very large one. I do not think there is a dog
nearby who I do not know. There are also small tracks of canine, one feline,
raccoon and an opossum. But mostly I am curious about the canine. Mentally, I
compare the tracks to those made by Lucas and realize this dog is half the size
of the Loki Mutt at least. That gives me an idea of the size but no idea of who
it might be and why it is here.

The mower’s path is back and forth, around and around, and
each pass signals less work to be done, more has been done, yet I was right
here, in this very spot last week and next week I will return here, an empty
harvest of grass heads, decapitated without cause except to have a green carpet
of uniform height and a total lack of biodiversity. I stopped mowing one year
and my neighbors cut my yard for me. Later they told me they assumed my mower
was broken and I didn’t want to bother them to borrow one. It’s a lot more work
to mow someone else’s grass than your own so I decided to keep my yard looking
like someone really does live here and mow.

There is a swale in the front yard that has turned into a
river of sorts a few times this year and the grass there is snarly thick. I
have to mow the swale at an angle to get the deck of the mower to cut the sides
of the swale perfectly. The swale is one of the lines of division in the yard.
The driveway, the garden, the old stump, and the swale are my demarcations that
I use to turn the yard into smaller blocks of mowing. It’s like drinking one
beer at a time instead of pouring the six pack into a larger container. Gnats swarm,
the temperature rises, the humidity increases, the sweat pours off of me, but
the task at hand does become less.

It has something to do with the season, this I am sure of,
but I get all of the front yard cut and a considerable piece of the back done
with one tank of gas. The last part of the back yard is where Bert began
digging craters many years ago and the new dogs have adopted the crater field
as their own. Sam is a trencher but Bert build bomb shelters. The L Hounds are
both diggers but not like Bert was. The main crater was one he dug and I’m not
sure how to fill it in without digging a hole of my own. It’s odd how you have
to go out and get dirt to fill in holes that dogs dig. It’s like they hide the
dirt from the holes where it cannot be found.

At last, the mowing is done. I will be back again this same
time next week, certainly, but soon it will be a job I have to do every ten
days or so and then two weeks, and then…one more time before I quit for the
season. The dogs are all happy the mower is off and as I look over the yard I
realize I can now see some of the late Summer vines on the fences. A change is
occurring, very slowly, but very steadily.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.